Billblog

I was going to apologize for not posting for a while

2007-02-15T13:27:00.000-08:00

but then all these people beat me to it.

Honestly, I will live to post again someday. I just finished up one deadline (AAAI) and now face another (UAI). Then there's that whole thesis-writing thing to get done with. And job searching. Other than that, life is just a breeze now. Whee!

The enigma that is Google

2007-01-26T10:05:00.000-08:00

Yes, it's the end of an era: Googling for miserable failure will no longer take you to George Bush's official bio. For that matter, "waffles" will no longer take you to John Kerry. Apparently Google has updated their search algorithm to fight against Googlebomb attacks by bloggers.

I've always wondered how much of Google's accuracy is dependent on specific, hand-coded tweaks, which a researcher like me tends to regard as a cheat as compared to automated algorithmic techniques (albeit a necessary one in the real world). Personally, I was surprised that Googlebombing worked as well as it did to begin with; it seemed to me that Google's accuracy relied a lot more on the ad hoc stuff they've applied on top of algorithms like PageRank than they normally let on. However, the new rankings apparently were done entirely through automation. I'm curious what they did. Some very informal observations of mine about Google techniques:

They seem to consciously favor known "reference sources" - Wikipedia links seem to come up high for a great many searches, for instance.
They also seem to put an automatic penalty on any page that might be classified as pornography. Do a search for "boobies", and you will see pages about the bird dominate the top results; I strongly suspect that would never be a natural result of PageRank alone.*
They're disproportionately friendly to academics, and particularly folks in technical disciplines. For example, at a recent machine learning reading group, we were amused that the UC Berkeley faculty member Michael Jordan actually manages to come up fourth in a search for "michael jordan"** - as opposed to, you know, another page about that other Michael Jordan. Perhaps this is the bias resulting from folks like us running Google.

* No, I don't actually sit around searching for things like "boobies" all day. Honest.
** I may have just helped increase his PageRank, actually.

The ultimate mix tape generation service

2007-01-23T21:51:00.000-08:00

Last night, at a dinner party, my dear friend Leah handed me something I realized I hadn't been a recipient of in a while: a mix tape. More accurately, a mix CD. The last mix-recording-delivery-instrument I recall getting was a tape from a girl in high school back in 1995, which, if I recall correctly, featured James Brown and Seven Year Bitch back to back. I had nearly forgotten the art of the mixtape.

At any rate, all of this reminded me of Tiny Mix Tapes' automatic mix tape generator, which has provided some entertaining mixes, such as "Songs for the guy who has the worst gas in the world, but you love him anyway" and "Songs for sleeping in a hammock".

And thanks, Leah, for the tunes; it's a lovely, laid back mix. Were I the Tiny Mix Tapes generator, I might produce it in response to "Songs to soothe me whilst on a long-distance car trip at 6 AM, driving bleary-eyed and perhaps a bit hungover and waiting for the caffeine to kick in." But I had no titles for the tracks; who was responsible for that cover of "Good Morning, Good Morning"?

Software bugs and misprinted cakes

2007-01-19T08:16:00.000-08:00

So apparently the bakeries at Wegmans - which, as any upstate New Yorker knows, is the finest purveyor of groceries the land over - employ software to handle automatic cake decoration. Customers can email requests for cakes and provide the desired text to decorate it with. Unfortunately, the software cannot handle Microsoft's nonstandard HTML extensions, so that when someone tried decorating with an Italian greeting featuring nonstandard characters, this was the result.

The world's most boring publication

2007-01-17T16:12:00.000-08:00

A classic from 1955, courtesy of the RAND Corporation: A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates. It's hard to believe that, at one point in time, a book containing nothing more than an obscenely long string of random digits was a genuinely significant contribution to humankind, but be not deceived: effective random number generation is hard. It's hard enough to require a 131-page specification courtesy of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. And in in an era when one couldn't count on having a cheap, fast PC to run well-established algorithms on, a book like this was indeed a blessing. I'm tempted to buy this to read on airplanes, just to creep out the person sitting next to me.

In other news, it's snowing here again.

2007-01-16T12:37:00.000-08:00

Ah, the joys of working at home. It's freeeeeezing out. This is very un-Seattle.

The view from my window:

The view of Tashkent Park from the front door:

Pop producers are now sampling C64 MOD files

2007-01-16T09:39:00.000-08:00

for their hits. Example: Timbaland blatantly ripped off a Finnish MOD writer for a Nelly Furtado song, and failed to give credit where it was due. (Link contains MP3s for comparison.) It wasn't just a minor sampling; pretty much the entire melody line was borrowed. How easy would it be for an average hobbyist like this guy to defend his copyright? Since copyright owners have gotten vigilant about sampling royalties, and court decisions have changed things to the point where famous albums couldn't have been produced today, perhaps they'll be opting to borrow from artists who aren't in nearly as good a position to defend their copyright claims. (Via Waxy.)

Don't buy Pop Tarts.

2007-01-07T14:01:00.000-08:00

Happy belated New Year. Yes, I've taken a break from blogging. I intend to post more, and in more depth. However, with a couple of paper deadlines approaching, and me having to begin my search for postdoc/research positions and write a thesis, I may have less time for plunging into the random nonsense I've oft posted in the past.

Having said that, here's some random nonsense: Jenni was watching Spongebob Squarepants today, and at the commercial break I caught an ad for Kellogg's Pop-Tarts that surprised me: it was in the style of famed animator Don Herzfeldt, of "Rejected" fame. Did Herzfeldt, who has refused to do commercials for years, finally sell out, I thought? Turns out no - they shamelessly ripped him off. For shame, Kellogg's! You can find them on the plagiarists' own website; notice the site is designed in Hertzfeldt style.

"The dynamic programming matrix (Peterson, 2003), for example, was M.C.A."

2006-12-23T14:59:00.000-08:00

Amusing: The Universal Text Imitator, which attempts to imitate the style of any arbitrary corpus of text by mere analysis of sentence structure, without any additional provided information about the documents.

More amusing: The Universal Text Imitator's output when applied to Beastie Boys lyrics.

From the "Hammering in a Screw" Department

2006-12-15T11:31:00.000-08:00

A touching tale of an AI developer whose managers insisted that neural networks were the way to go for a project, despite all evidence indicating this was a profoundly bad idea. No doubt management had read some article about neural networks in Superficial Coverage of Technology Monthly and concluded that they, too, needed a piece of that somehow. Why can't managers leave implementation details to the people who, um, know something about implementation?

Aw, crap.

2006-12-13T22:08:00.000-08:00

Well, I thought my plan to take advantage of sky-high copper prices and melt down the craploads of accumulated pre-1982 pennies I have to sell as scrap metal was foolproof. Sadly, I was wrong. I can't even take them to Canada and do it there! Damn you, US Mint!!! I'm so depressed now. But not depressed enough to jump off the Aurora Bridge, as nine(!) people apparently have this year.

In defense of fruitcake

2006-12-10T17:02:00.000-08:00

Fruitcake: You can gift it, regift it, scoff at it, or toss it. Few, however, are moved to actually eat it. Two weeks ago I made Alton Brown's Free Range Fruitcake. Instead of creepy-looking artifically colored candied fruit, it uses basic dried fruit soaked in gallons of alcohol. I let the fruitcake sit and ponder its existence for two weeks, allowing flavors to mingle, spraying it with cognac to keep it nice and moist. The result:

Dense, yes, but actually quite tasty. If you've only encountered storebought fruitcake, you might be pleased by the homemade version. I am now a convert to fruitcake.

My mom's research

2006-12-08T17:33:00.000-08:00

It has warmed the hearts of beer drinkers everywhere. Way to go, Mom.

Blogalicious links

2006-12-08T09:46:00.000-08:00

Currently at NIPS workshops in Whistler, so my time is short. However, a few links I wanted to note/share:

Data Mining, a somewhat interesting blog on analysis of the web and textual media - although I don't find it actually involves that much data mining in the true sense of the term.

Indexed, a very highly amusing (yet low-intellectual-commitment) blog.

And, in other news, there will soon be a film based on the 1999 Seattle WTO riots. Of course, as is the case for 99% of filmed media set in Seattle, most of the filming is in Vancouver. Nonetheless, film crews will apparently be owning parts of downtown this coming week.

I'm in ur b00k, stealing ur w0rdz

2006-11-28T15:18:00.000-08:00

Caught.

Excerpt from Atonement, by Ian McEwan...

"In the way of medical treatments, she had already dabbed gentian violet on ringworm, aquaflavine emulsion on a cut, and painted lead lotion on a bruise. But mostly she was a maid."

Excerpt from No Time For Romance by Lucilla Andrews...

"Our 'nursing' seldom involved more than dabbing gentian violet on ringworm, aquaflavine emulsion on cuts and scratches, lead lotion on bruises and sprains."

As more and more books are transferred to electronic media and sucked up by the gigantic information vortex that is Google, it's going to become mighty easy to find plagiarism. I have a feeling we'll see a lot of this popping up in coming years, with many long-dead and long-revered authors being revealed as cheaters. (Via Slog).

Snow in Seattle!

2006-11-26T19:45:00.000-08:00

w00t! It's white outside.

The view from my window. OK, well, this picture is actually from the LAST notable snow day I was around for in Seattle, not today. It was back in 2004, and we sledded down a closed section of E. Harrison St. on cardboard boxes. We then let the lizards play with a snowball, which seemed to confuse the poor little desert creatures.

Anyways, it's snowing here. Time to get some hot chocolate going.

At bat: Theleft ... fielder.

2006-11-26T14:54:00.000-08:00

The title of this post will make absolutely no sense to no one except myself and one other person on the face of the earth. OK, so does anyone out there remember Earl Weaver Baseball? It was a great game for the Commodore Amiga from the late 80s, and it had a great synthesized voice that announced the players, as in

At Bat: Jose Canseco.

except that, in this case, it invariably pronounced his name as "Joe's Can-sicko" unless you changed the "Phoneme" entry for him.

And while I'm on the subject, does anyone have a link to a good web interface to a voice synthesizer? I'm thinking of a cheesy old-school one like the old "SAM" program for the Commodore 64; I would love to find one.

Other random tidbits:

This post covers the issue of exactly why some cities' lame efforts to attract creative people and young professional are so lame. Sadly, I find my list of desired locations to live as I prepare for the job market rather small and limiting, precisely because I'm afraid of finding no neighborhoods that I can genuinely enjoy living in, and trying to cultivate these synthetic little urban petting zoos designed to trick plastic-frame-wearing hipters into thinking your town is a mecca of creativity and fun just doesn't cut it.

Here we have a story of a man who was banned from his gym for grunting while lifting weights. The horror! Someone actually exerted themselves during a workout! If they ever pulled this at my gym, I would cancel my membership. Immediately.

Finally, I have lived on pumpkin pie as my Thanksgiving dessert of choice, which has left me ignorant of the sweet potato pie. I'd love to try some sweet potato pie, even though I won't be able to take it on a plane, apparently.

Thanksgiving

2006-11-22T15:06:00.000-08:00

Damn you, Sony! (UPDATE: Don't bother: the killjoys at Amazon have removed the comical PS3 review this link once pointed to. Sigh.)

The parents are in town, and Jenni is currently preparing a delicious feast for us all, with which I assist here and there. (She's been very hardcore about this - everything is from scratch. It will be to die for, I assure you.) Anyone out there looking for some Thanksgiving dinner? Drop me a line. We've got plenty of bird to go around.

Mocking grammar for great justice

2006-11-21T18:47:00.000-08:00

Yes, it's true: People don't know how to use apostrophes. (Please give me credit for not saying "apostrophe's".) My personal favorite: the grammatically challenged Emily Dickinson plaque. They also don't understand that quotation marks are not used to accentuate. Now all we need is a catalog of unnecessarily hyphenated instances of the word "today". <-- (correctly quoted)

Today's news in privileged college kid hiphop

2006-11-17T09:45:00.000-08:00

The Yale/Harvard rivalry gets profoundly lame. Besides, these guys could never hold a candle to computer science rappers.

Condos, condos, condos

2006-11-14T17:40:00.000-08:00

Apologies to all zero of my regular readers for my recent absence. Won't happen again, with any luck. Anyways, behold Vertigo: the most hideous condo development in Seattle, a block away from me. This monstrosity used to be a relatively quaint old apartment complex before the bloodsucking developers got their hands on it. There's a poster out front for it with some terrible slogan on the front, something like "In your game of tag, this is base". Between this, the Cha Cha, and the 5,392 other hideous condo developments going up in our neighborhood (which are all guaranteed to crumble after the mortgage is paid off, of course), is this the end of Capitol Hill? Will it turn into Belltown?

Addendum: a LiveJournal entry from a former occupant.

Been busy ... another grab bag

2006-11-01T19:20:00.001-08:00

I've been busy lately with UW Industrial Affiliates meeting and workshop submissions, and haven't had time to blog the night away. A few notes of interest ...

The Cha-Cha Lounge here in Capitol Hill is being demolished to make way for a 96-unit condo development, according to the Slog. Agggggh. Just what we need here - MORE cheesy condo development. At least I'll be able to get a place dirt cheap when the market stagnates next year and the developers get left holding the bag.

This one's a little late, but ... a sexy mental patient costume? Huh?

Geek craft of the day: a hard drive belt buckle.

Today's sounds: Beck, The Information.

The V of Doom!

2006-10-29T12:27:00.000-08:00

Why did this Viacom logo creep me - and others - out so much when it appeared at the end of TV shows when I was a kid? At least I wasn't the only one.

...

2006-10-28T09:45:00.000-07:00

The air in the room was thick with the scent of power and vestigial conviction. Secretary of Defense Longinus McClung was literally twiddling his thumbs in his chair when President Elston D'Aquino entered the room, and Gen. Erasmus Flynn was standing at full attention, gazing intently beyond D'Aquinos head.

"It's the transmission from the Kappa quadrant, sir", McClung said, hesitantly.

D'Aquino sat down, and his men in black dutifully fell into place behind him. He gazed intently at McClung. Longinus was, for lack of a better word, a sweaty man. Everything about the man perspired, from his faintly shining brow down to the wet, sticky, odorous mess that was his very soul. Friends would helpfully suggest medication, but McClung was a closet Scientologist and refused all medication that did not come in the brightly colored shape of a cartoon character.

"It was ... there was a most unsettling, shall I say, for lack of a better word or means of conveying the unsettlingness of the matter, sir, it was, uh ...Perhaps Gen. Flynn may fill us in on the details."

Flynn nodded. As he would speak, he was haunted by the image of his wife, Bienvenida Goddard Flynn, making passionate love to Eric Rombokas, whispering the sweet nothings that stood the hairs upon her neck on end more firmly than Flynn's own surgically enhanced spine stood as he spoke.

There is a robot, sir," Flynn said. "A killer robot. From outer space."

D'Aquino sighed. He knew that his legacy, like every one before it, would come down to moments like this - moments when Fate hurled an arrow our way, unmercifully, perhaps with some kind of sling, and the futures of millions, including a small pool of misfit teenagers who needed something to give them hope in the future, would stand inalterably altered by his will. It made him, for lack of a better word, horny.

"Is there any hope?"

"Our calculations, sir, indicate that our army will face casualties in the quadrillions were to take down this enemy via conventional means."

D'Aquino pounded his fist on the table. "Well, you eggheads are just gonna have to start THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX, THEN!" He shot out of his seat and stormed out in a counterfeit of conviction, stealing a couple of mints out of the bowl on the table first.

Grab bag

2006-10-26T20:59:00.000-07:00

A new record has been set for the highest Scrabble score ever: 830. Sweet Jesus. I can only dream of such achievements in my as-yet comparatively unimpressive career Scrabbling record.

In other news, our current President likes some really disgusting recipes, a new book by his former chef reveals. (Props to Slog.)

826 Seattle is the Seattle chapter of 826 Valencia, a cool organization founded by Dave Eggers which helps kids develop their writing skills. Right now, they are having a Mustache-A-Thon to raise cash, and blogging the affair.

The Enron Explorer!

2006-10-24T10:42:00.000-07:00

When Enron collapsed in an avalanche of lawsuits and criminal charges, the text classification and data mining community were unexpectedly gifted with the mighty Enron email corpus, released to the public as a byproduct of court investigations. This has presented researchers with a huge dataset on which to test social networking and document classification related algorithms.

Anyways, the Enron Explorer is now here, letting you search online through a massive collection of Enron emails. You can find strange flirtation, executive flames, fratboy chest-thumping, and other such mildly amusing ephemera.

Creepy cartoons and CS researchers

2006-10-22T10:48:00.000-07:00

I have fallen for the charms of The Comics Curmudgeon, a blog by a man with a keen eye for the underlying pathos and deeply disturbing dark innards of your newspaper's comics section.

Whoa ... creepy. I was just watching UWTV, and saw myself in the audience of a seminar on quantum computation - our department's seminars are routinely featured there. A couple weeks ago my advisor said to me "Hey, I saw you asking a question on TV last night!" (he was watching a talk by Luis von Ahn, who has earned my envy by winning a MacArthur grant).

Speaking of Luis von Ahn, his research is interesting stuff. What he's done is take a lot of tedious, repetitive tasks of collecting information - for example, labeling all the images on the Web - and solve them by designing online games which are fun to play, but, as a side effect, actually have the users indirectly solving these problems. The game Peekaboom is an example of this - it seems like a straightfoward two-player game, but the resulting gameplay is used to collect keywords relevant to a particular digital image.

Two things that people have taken with them all over the world

2006-10-21T20:26:00.000-07:00

1) A can of S&W black beans.

2) A Nintendo Game Boy.

Why Women Can't Do Math:

2006-10-21T13:53:00.000-07:00

Because they're convinced they can't, apparently.

A report published Thursday in the peer-reviewed journal Science showed that women exposed to theories saying females are genetically bad at math performed far worse on math tests than women who had not been exposed to such beliefs ... The research, [researcher Steven Heine] said, shows that people believe they can overcome stereotyping and continue to try. But if they blame their genetic makeup and believe they have an innate lack of ability, they give up, he said.

This is, more generally, one of the hazards of the excessive trendiness of research in genetics and evolutionary psychology, I think. It's been abused and twisted by partisans and charlatans to justify pretty much every reactionary, nonsensical notion about sex, race, intelligence, etc. that society had so far failed to completely quash and render laughable. And when these bad idea thrive, they can sometimes be self-fulfilling.

I await the long-overdue backlash against nature, and in favor of nurture.

Japanese Nose Abuse

2006-10-21T13:46:00.000-07:00

Yeah, yeah, yeah ... it's the Japanese being weird again (probably NSFW). Big surprise.

Followup: Yes indeed, no one uses Friendster.

2006-10-18T16:42:00.000-07:00

In case we didn't know that already.

“The counter to that is, ‘Tell me why you aren’t going to be the next Friendster,’ ” Mr. Sze said. “It’s become the iconic case of failure." ... so badly did Friendster fumble its early lead that, as of last month, it ranked 14th among all social networking sites tracked by comScore Media Metrix, trailing even myYearbook.com, a site started last year by a 16-year-old high school student.

Still, who knows? If Myspace suffers some horrible setback - like a few unfortunate outages, or mass discovery by liberal-leaning Myspacers that the place is owned by the Fox News crew - maybe people will actually log into Friendster again, realize the same features are there on Friendster now, and voila! a second chance. Assuming they even last long enough for that.

A collection of names from actual spam headers that would make for good protagonists of a novel

2006-10-15T09:30:00.000-07:00

Chastity Baez
Jesus Hancock
Erasmus Flynn
Hiawatha Greek
Elston D'Aquino
New MySpace Message
Eric Rombokas*
Bienvenida Goddard
Henrietta Huffman
Luciano Herrington
Fenella Durand
Longinus McClung
Ebony Hartley

* actually, this one wasn't spam, but I accidentally deleted it. Sorry, Eric.

It is official.

2006-10-15T09:16:00.000-07:00

I need to do more songwriting again, like I did many moons ago. Grad school has a way of knocking all other hobbies one once had off the table ... but no more! No longer will I be silenced by, oh, say, the threat of never getting my goddamn PhD. My new skills as a researcher will come to good use in this, however. After careful scientific study, I have concluded that the song that will produce the most pleasure in the listener, and thus make me somewhat rich, perhaps even in this era of BitTorrent, is a song about a killer robot who comes to take over our species to make way for an alien race but, along the way, encounters a poor little orphan girl who in some odd way makes him reminisce about a lost love he had many moons ago, and is thus inspired to help a group of misfit teenagers start an amazingly successful dance troupe. In this series of events and the good-natured hilarity that ensues, much about life and love will be learned by all concerned, needless to say.

I'll get right to work on that.

Free machine learning research idea

2006-10-14T11:38:00.000-07:00

So this was a machine learning paper I've been meaning to write but probably will not get around to ...

In co-training, one uses multiple feature sets to describe the same data items, and trains classifiers for both, using the labels provided by one classifier on unlabeled to provide labeled data for retraining the other, with ostensibly improved results. If both classifiers are weakly predictive, this will produce good results even with a very small amount of labeled data.

A similar idea could extend to clustering, where one could break down a set of features into two or more mutually independent (or reasonably close to that) subsets, and perform clustering along each iteratively, using the clustering of one to improve the clustering of the other - e.g. weighting the features in such a way as to reflect the clustering provided by the other feature set. Would this perform better than clustering along the full feature set alone? Under what circumstances?

Lazy Saturday linking

2006-10-14T10:53:00.000-07:00

Was up until late last night on a paper deadline crunch, currently watching DVDs of BBC's Life of Mammals series.

This project makes me happy. Because once I have access to Wikipedia in my pocket, I'll wonder how I lived without it, no doubt.

Today's sounds: The Mountain Goats.

A one-of-a-kind collectible from the Bradford Exchange

2006-10-11T22:57:00.000-07:00

Don't miss out on this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, you consumer you.

Lebowski Party

2006-10-08T20:37:00.000-07:00

A splendid time was had by all at the Lebowski party, with photos to prove it. In attendance was many a Dude, a Donny or two, some nihilists, the many faces of Maude, Jesus, and an elusive Stranger. No carpetry was stolen, although a disturbing yellow stain persists on the rug that currently ties our room together. One thing is clear: any future Lebowski parties must take place in late-night bowling alleys. Anyone up to roll a few sometime?

The horrible truth

2006-10-06T12:09:00.000-07:00

It's funny because it's true.

Tracking Devices for Alzheimer's Patients

2006-10-04T10:46:00.000-07:00

" Caroline County began training deputies today for Project Lifesaver. It provides electronic tracking devices for people with Alzheimer's and dementia." Someday, the technology I'm working on will be integrated into these devices for smarter tracking and analysis. w00t.

Sunday Hungover Blogging

2006-10-01T10:50:00.000-07:00

Bwahaha. I'd like to know exactly who felt that this was absolutely begging to be written up, published, and given a line on someone's CV.

I highly recommend holding pillowfighting tournaments at your next party. By the way, this is the most unnecessary usage of 360-degree photography ever. Thank you, Google.

Out of curiosity, does anyone on this blighted planet still actually use Friendster? Just logged in for the first time in a year or so. Anyone? Bueller? I'd get a Myspace page, but I'm waiting for Myspace to go out of style and ride whatever the next social-networking train is instead. As for Orkut, well, apparently that's only useful if you're Brazilian.

A silly project ...

2006-09-27T14:50:00.000-07:00

OK, so my goal here is to collect completely silly cleaned-up quotes from the edited-for-TV versions of profanity-laden movies. Examples:

From Fargo: "Jerry you're a liar, a ... a FRUISING liar!!!" (formerly "fucking liar")

From The Big Lebowski: "Do you SEE WHAT HAPPENS LARRY when you FIX A STRANGER SCRAMBLED EGGS!!!" (formerly "when you FUCK A STRANGER IN THE ASS") (I've also heard "Meet a Stranger in the Alps".)

I intend to collect more. Suggestions welcome.

Audio inspired by classic arcade games

2006-09-27T11:06:00.000-07:00

Fun link 1: The theme music to Atari games.

Fun link 2: An old LP featuring a guy talking about how to win arcade games.

Fun link 3: C64 remixes.

Fun link 4: Impossible Mission!

First two links taken from BoingBoing and Waxy.

Scientists and engineers discover activism

2006-09-27T10:53:00.000-07:00

About time that scientists realize their careers and values are under attack:

"Today a group of scientists and concerned citizens launch a new organization, Scientists and Engineers for America, dedicated to electing public officials who respect evidence and understand the importance of using scientific and engineering advice in making public policy. "

(Lifted from BoingBoing.)

You got a date Wednesday, baby!

2006-09-25T15:27:00.000-07:00

With my own Big Lebowski party coming up soon, I was quite happy yesterday to make (with Jenni's help) serious inroads on my Jesus costume, having found a purple shirt, jacket, and pants tight enough to get me arrested in municipalities with higher community standards. All I need now is some rings and a bowling glove, and I will be ready for the semis.

Teaching matters

2006-09-25T08:19:00.000-07:00

This is good to hear: universities are starting to take teaching seriously. It's always a severe disappointment when a talented scholar turns out to be a terrible teacher, and it's more common that it ought to be. The chair of our department has stated in the past that a research university's job is not only to crank out great research, but to train the next generation of great researchers; the second part is too often ignored.

For those who have been wondering "How do I make an ugly, ugly, ugly Myspace page?"

2006-09-24T14:45:00.000-07:00

Wonder no more. In no time, you'll be creating pages like this crime against aesthetics.

I Like To Watch

2006-09-24T13:52:00.000-07:00

I Like To Watch

"I like to watch / CopVision is a program that watches television. Specifically, it watches COPS on Fox ... CopVision learns its language from closed captioning subtitles transmitted in the television signal. Everything that is said on COPS is tucked away in its memory to help it understand what it's seeing. It analyzes every frame, searching the field for outlines that remind it of something it has seen before. When it recognizes a contour it tags it with a guess as to what might be going on, gathered from its experience of words and pictures that go together."

With respect to research in commonsense reasoning, I found this interesting, because one difficulty in such reasoning is collecting lots of commonsense knowledge about the world - e.g. information such as "When you are hungry, you eat." We use a tremendous amount of simple information like this in our everyday lives, and it's not obvious how to collect all of it in one place. There have been attempts to collect this information through hand-entering by experts, through passive analysis of Web text (and other text as well), through collaborative effort by Internet users, and indirectly through online games. Another possible source of low-effort commonsense collection could be through parsing the text from closed-captioned TV programs.

Today's sounds and words

2006-09-24T12:09:00.000-07:00

The Magnetic Fields' "69 Love Songs" may be the most perfect album in years. I have just listened to the song "I Don't Want To Get Over You" enough times to make my ears bleed, and I'm not quite sick of it yet. Also just read John Hodgman's Areas of My Expertise, which is quite a larf. You can hear him read the names of 700 hoboes online.

I am now one of the blogeoisie

2006-03-08T14:19:00.000-08:00

This is the first post. Whoopee. This blog will be reserved for sharing personal information and satisfying any exhbitionist tendencies which may exist in me. More frequent updates will likely occur at my other blog on common sense reasoning.